One of the fastest growing areas of communications technology is related to automobile network solutions. The demand and potential for wireless vehicle communication, networking, and diagnostics services have recently increased. Although many vehicles on the road today have systems with limited wireless communication functions such as unlocking a door and setting or disabling a car alarm, new vehicles offer communication systems that help personalize comfort settings, run maintenance and diagnostic functions, place telephone calls, access call center information, update controller systems, determine vehicle location, assist in tracking vehicle after a theft of the vehicle, and provide other vehicle related services. Vehicle users can contact call centers and receive navigational, concierge, emergency, and location services, as well as other specialized help such as locating the geographical location of a stolen vehicle and honking the horn of a vehicle when the owner cannot locate it in a large parking garage. Such vehicle control and communications features can be orchestrated by a vehicle telematics device, which is operably connected to various vehicle systems and to a call center through a wireless network.
Controllers and software play a large role in the automation of an increasing number of vehicle functions. With the constant evolution of technologies, upgrades are frequently made to vehicle software modules to provide additional vehicle features, for example support for different languages or to improve the performance of existing vehicle functions. The installation of upgraded software modules can be handled manually by vehicle technicians at a vehicle dealership. The manual installation of vehicle-specific software requires costly vehicle technician time and can be time consuming. Often times, there are long time gaps between visits to a vehicle dealership. As a result, the vehicle is not available for a vehicle technician to manually upgrade the vehicle software modules, thereby depriving the vehicle owner of software upgrades and improved functionality.
To facilitate interaction between the vehicle user and the telematics device, it is desirable to communicate in the user's native language. It is often impractical, however, for a vehicle to include software modules for supporting more than a couple of languages. For example, the storage and execution of several language modules typically requires a large amount of memory and processing power. Further, it may require the aforementioned time-consuming software upgrades should additional language functionalities become available.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide multi-language support for a vehicle telematics device that does not require large amounts of memory and processing power and would allow relatively fast incorporation of additional language functionalities. It is desirable, therefore, to provide a system and method for providing language translation in a vehicle telematics device that would overcome the aforementioned and other disadvantages.